The roadmap to successful information governance
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AI in 2024: Should We Still Be “Moving Fast and Breaking Things”?
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Microsoft is eager to get customers to Windows 10. Part of this campaign involved pushing the new system automatically to many users’ home computers last year when it came out. Now Microsoft is subtly issuing limited compatibility requirements for new processors, meaning that your firm all but has to upgrade to Windows 10 if you are planning to buy new computers. This is important news for law firms, 90% of which are running Windows 7, according to a survey by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA).
Last year, a massive cyberattack on law firm Mossack Fonseca exposed some of the world’s most powerful people in a web of suspicious financial transactions. Dubbed the Panama Papers, the 11.5 million published documents revealed a widespread system of global tax evasion involving prominent individuals from FIFA soccer officials to the Icelandic Prime Minister.
The Panamanian law firm, however, was far from the only legal organization to suffer a major hack in 2016. A recent survey published by the American Bar Association found an additional 26 percent of law firms with 500 attorneys or more experienced security breaches in the past year.
Making the transition to a Hosted system is a step businesses in every sector will need to consider in the near future. While the many benefits of hosted telephony are becoming vastly more understood, any upgrade to your firm’s infrastructure needs to be carefully weighed up. So, what makes hosted telephony such an attractive option for modern businesses, and how well do these advantages translate to the specific needs of your law firm?
This is a big day for iManage. For starters, the company has unveiled iManage Work 10, a new version of its document and email management system. ‘This is the biggest piece of news for iManage in at least 13 years, maybe ever,’ says the company’s chief marketing officer Dan Carmel.
iManage has also enhanced its iManage Cloud services with technologies used by leading Internet firms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. ‘The cloud services are a substantial rewrite,’ says Carmel. ‘This is a clear leapfrogging of anything else that exists in the market today and plants a very big stake in the ground for the next 10 years.’
The security-related lexicon pertaining to email scams is rapidly growing. There’s phishing, spear-phishing, ransomware, whaling; and most recently, I heard of ‘smishing’. Not entirely an email scam, but these SMS-based messages have an email like format with email-specific fields in the messages and malicious links hiding behind shortened URLs.
Cybercrime is indeed a global problem, but law firms are especially susceptible due to the large volume of highly sensitive client data they hold on businesses and individuals; in addition to the fact that they are also cash rich.
In my experience, social media management is probably the main area of customer engagement where law firms fall flat. Admittedly, it’s a tough nut to crack, whichever industry you’re in, but the legal sector seems particularly bad when it comes to implementing effective social media strategies.
In recent years, I’ve come across countless profiles that have been left to stagnate, languishing in the dusty corners of the Web, deemed unworthy of due care and attention because they didn’t deliver retweets and mentions. After all, who’s going to ‘Like’ a lawyer or ‘Share’ a solicitor, right?
In the course of only a decade, e-discovery has moved from a costly experiment pursued by only the largest law firms to a near necessity for organizations of all sizes. Today, even small and medium firms are adopting the technology, spurred on by the availability of third-party resources, lower implementation costs, the challenge of preserving digital information, and encouragement from judges. Over the last few years, the scope of e-discovery has spread to criminal proceedings, breaking free of its historical confinement to the civil realm. As e-discovery continues to mature, its capabilities and applications will only continue to expand.
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